The Big Interview.

A Conversation with Mike Sager.

Today, for the first time, we are doing a shared story between ACL and The Material Review. This interview with Mike Sager encapsulates so much of what I am trying to do at in my life and also at ACL. It felt wrong not to share it with everyone. All credit for this goes to TMR editor Taylor Stacey for orchestrating a great conversation. Hope you like it. -MW

Mike Sager is an author, reporter, and publisher whose career spans more than four decades. He’s written for The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, GQ, and Esquire, including stories that have gone on to inspire films like Boogie Nights and the TMR favorite, Last Tango in Tahiti. We caught up with him during his daily constitutional walk to talk about his long-lost story on yuppies (republished here for the first time), how he’s used appearance as a reporting tool, and doing sh/t his own way. Enjoy.

ACL: Let’s start with the “Demographic Man” (Read the Story Here). That seemed really interesting and the kind of thing we talk a lot about (on ACL) — consumerism and the role brands play in people’s lives.

Mike Sager: I’ve done two versions of the story, years apart. The first ran in the April 1986 issue of Regardie’s, though it was never collected. Regardie’s motto was “Money, Power, Greed.” It was peak Gordon Gekko, Wall Street 80s. We all had silver baseball jackets with the slogan on the back. I used to love wearing mine while weaving my Honda CX500 Custom through D.C. traffic. Shout out to Bill Regardie of D.C. and Key West, quite a character in his day. I still talk to him a couple of times a year.

The Regardie’s artwork was a play on a popular Maxell campaign from the cassette boom. Their “Blown-Away Guy” ad, where a man sits in a chair blasted by sound, was everywhere. You could say it was the meme of its time.

The second version appeared in Esquire in 2009 and was later collected in my book The Someone You’re Not. It revisited the idea of “The Demographic Man.” Back then, Esquire ran “Esquire Man” contests for readers. The guy from that story was the 2009 winner. We still keep in touch.

ACL: Is there anything that sticks out to you, anything you took away from that experience?

MS: I felt that had I been Tom Wolfe, they’d have called them yuppies, the “Demographic Man.” There were always brands, and there was always brand loyalty. Sears, Fruit of the Loom, whatever. You bought the same ones and associated them with quality. But during the early 80s, the consumerist revolution really took off. Everybody had a brand identity and reasons for using everything. You could see the start of it.

I found it interesting that the concept has now been carried out to the nth degree. When I started freelancing, one of the first things people told me was, “Never change your byline.” I realized I was building my brand, even though nobody called it that back then. Now it’s branding.